Astrid Kruse Jensen Floating
Martin Asbæk Gallery is incredibly proud to present the exhibition Floating by Astrid Kruse Jensen. The exhibition, which opens on Friday 26 April, consists of a number of new photographic works which include new elements such as embroidery and photographs printed on fabric.
Through her artistic work Kruse Jensen has challenged and explored the basic photographic material. She started her activities with technically perfect photography where she had full control of the whole process, and has since then moved in a more experimental direction.
In her earlier series Disappearing Into The Past and Within The Landscape, which were also created on Polaroid film, Kruse Jensen deliberately abandoned control of parts of the process. This is exactly where her interest lies, in the photographic and chemical process, where process and content are fused together. In this exhibition Kruse Jensen works with Polaroid film, but she has now put the material more to the test than before. Through the use of double exposures, backlight and long shutter times where she creates movements of the camera, the specific space is dissolved and erased. The works appear almost painting-like and at the same time are definitively photographic. With this working method, concrete reality is challenged, so new realities arise as abstract motifs. The original subject disappears, is transformed and becomes abstract. We see this among other ways in her presentation of domestic interiors where the incoming light, double exposures and distortions of perspective create doubt in the viewer as to whether what we are looking at is real or a dream. The interiors become images of a state, more than of physical interiors.
In her work with photography Kruse Jensen has moved beyond the normal understanding of what photography is, and has experimented with its materiality in the form of photographs printed on fabric, and embroidered textual works created from what she calls impossible photographs, where embroidered words take their positions from the photographic subject. A particularly intimate motivic world arises for the viewer in these embroideries, taking place only in the world of ideas, instead of on the photographic paper.
The title of the exhibition refers to a fluid state between the real and the unreal, the controlled and the uncontrolled. So let yourself be carried away and swallowed up by Astrid Kruse Jensen’s motivic world, where the indefinable is defined and the unreality of reality takes control.
Astrid Kruse Jensen (b. 1975, Aarhus) has studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in the Netherlands and at the Glasgow School of Art. She has been nominated for several prizes, for example the Deutsche Börse Preis in 2014. In 2017 she won Anne Marie Telmányi’s prize for women artists, and in 2008 she was awarded a grant by the Niels Wessel Bagge Art Foundation, just to mention a few honours. Astrid Kruse Jensen has had solo exhibitions in Denmark, Sweden, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Iceland and India, and has had several group exhibitions in Europe, the USA, Canada, Russia and China. Astrid Kruse Jensen’s works are in several private and public collections, including at the George Eastman House, ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, The National Museum of Photography, and Museet for Fotokunst, Manchester City Gallery, Vestsjællands Kunstmuseum, Artotheque de Caen, the John Kobal Foundation and the Danish Arts Foundation.